If you’ve not really realised your potential and always feel that you could do better but never seems to get ahead despite putting your best effort then these blog post contributed by my long time personal training client might be able to provide some tips and inspiration for you to push on.
Why hear it from this client of mine? First, this client named Anant Sandhu has been overweight most of his childhood life and had struggled to lose the excess weight despite trying many things. He could have easily given up and say that he would never lose the weight due to bad genetics. But he did not and lose 23 kilograms of fat and almost seeing his abs in the last 2 years despite been on and off the program. Sure it is nothing compared to what you see in The Biggest Loser Show but he never gives up despite a schedule of frequent travelling and other personal commitment. He gets right into his fat loss regime when he can. BTW, he also went from being an amateur golfer to a Pro amateur golfer travelling around the world competing in golfing tournaments. Seriously, it is much easier to achieve fat loss success in an artificial environment seen in The Biggest Loser Show. Everything is so much more controlled.
Personally, I believe if you want to achieve success in the real world you got to study what the successful people have done, see which strategies apply to you and take action. So I decided to ask Anant what are the strategies he used that he felt have the most impact on his body shape and health.
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When it comes to strength training, many people especially the ladies did not realise the impact on how it affect how one’s self esteem, confidence and the body shape. If you had read my last blogpost, you would realised the impact of strength training. Recently, I have been training a really awesome female client who have made tremendous headways in her fitness. And she is cool enough to share with us how all this strength training has affected her in terms of body shape and fitness in an interview in this blogpost here.
She is the real life proof that a woman can become very strong, lose fat and still look like a woman doing heavy strength training. Just recently, she had just nailed her 3 chin ups and she has never ever thought she could do even one at all. Have a look at what she has achieved in terms of her physiques with the strength training between last October and this year March with about one to one half month break in between as I was away.
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Why You Should Train for Strength
Strength, which is one of the key component of fitness, seems to be the most neglected in comparison to muscular and cardiovascular endurance.When it comes to exercise, most people seems to see improving their aerobic fitness as a priority. Types of cardiovascular activities include distance running, cycling or swim done at moderate intensity over an extended period. Before you think that I have a problem with that, I must clarify that I don’t and certainly they’re not something I like to do to be honest. But it’s a fact that your strength is not gonna improve if you only spend time doing those types of activities and nothing else. And I would never dispute the importance of doing cardiovascular activities for overall health and fitness and certainly had its place. But what I think is most people think that strength training is reserved for meatheads or people who wants to get buff and underestimate the importance of training for strength in terms of its impact on health and human performance.
Importance of Strength Training
Exercise, Sports Performance and Preventing Injuries
Whether you’re playing sports such as basketball, soccer or netball and doing exercises such as running or swimming, you got to have some level of strength to perform all these physical task. Imagine trying to jump in a basketball game and you constantly go jelly in your legs because you don’t have enough strength in your legs. Obviously, that sort of problem is going to affect anyone’s game performance. The worst thing is not having enough strength to sustain good enough techniques or form when you run or play your sports and as a results hurt yourself from bad techniques. On the other hand, if you build an excellent level of strength you won’t have to be using your near maximal level of strength to perform your task and worry about muscular fatigue. And that’s a good situation to be in because you can constantly perform at your best without worrying about muscular fatigue as you’re never at your threshold. Furthermore, strength training also increase bone strength and develops stronger connective tissue around the joint to enhance joint stability that will certainly help prevent injuries. [click to continue…]
When it comes to choosing the exercises for an effective fat loss workout, there is plenty to choose from. As a Perth personal trainer, I personally like to keep things simple and effective. The last thing you want is end up being too complicated, become more confused about what you should do and end up with nothing done at all. Remember, the bottomline is to lose fat in a fat loss workout NOT to become too complicated. This is usually a common problem with many people going to big fancy gym alone where there is no lack of sophisticated equipments to keep you more clueless about where to start.
Below are my top 5 picks of exercises that I would use in my personal training clients’ fat loss workout. They required very minimal equipments and offer you the biggest bang for your buck. If you want to look great, become more functional and stronger, then I recommend these 5 exercises.
Hardstyle Kettlebell Swings
The Russian Hardstyle Kettlebell Swing is one of the first few exercises that comes to my mind when someone wants to get a lean and toned body fast. According to a scientific study titled “Effect of Explosive versus Slow Contractions and Exercise Intensity on Energy Expenditure”, explosive muscle contraction with moderate intensity burned more calories and causes more of a metabolic boost than slow muscle contraction. Also, there is a preferential activation of fast-twitch muscle fiber in explosive muscle contraction that used 3 to 4 times more energy than slow muscle contraction. If you are planning a fat loss workout, an exercise like the Hardstyle kettlebell swing that requires explosive type muscle contraction is certainly a strong consideration. The Hardstyle Kettlebell Swings are unlike any other form of swings in terms of how it works the core, glutes and burn calories. It is done with a strong and powerful hip drive that causes the kettlebell to swing up that makes it such an inefficient movement. Because of this hip drive, it does not conserve energy and instead burn energy at high gear which is what you want in a fat loss workout. When done with one arm, the core muscles have to work harder to ensure that there is no rotation in the trunk. To learn how to do a Hardstyle Kettlebell Swing, go to this link. [click to continue…]
